


Hiraeth

by azurish



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, alternate universe - imaginary, background Potter family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-30
Updated: 2013-11-30
Packaged: 2018-01-03 00:48:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1063682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sirius and Remus ache with the past and future they never had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hiraeth

            He can see the past they didn’t have in the wrinkles by Remus’s eyes.  If he squints, he can see crows’ feet there, lines tucked away into Remus’s face by countless smiles across pillows while they lie, propped up on their elbows, naked, watching each other as lazy sunlight spills slowly into a shared room.  The days that weren’t spin themselves out in his mind.  They laugh and cry and make love and they grow up together.  They leave Hogwarts and drift back to each other like gravity, and then it’s two decades later and they’re in Godric's Hollow for his godson’s seventeenth birthday.  Two pairs of Lily’s green eyes and one pair of hazel eyes – the adults’ with the crows’ feet they never grew old enough to have – meet theirs across a cozy table.  Harry beams at his favorite uncles and all of the men have ruffled his hair before the evening is out with the kind of sacred pride reserved for men who have been watching a boy grow up since he was born.  He and Remus return to a house with two stories and dozens of well-worn books and one bed with a red-and-gold bedspread.  When Sirius wakes up the next morning, Moony is already awake, and the smile dawns on his face as slowly, gently, inexorably as the sun outside.  Crows’ feet crinkle at the corners of green eyes and Sirius kisses him, sloppy and open, morning breath and all.

            But Sirius’s gaze and the world always jerk back into sharp focus.  The lines by Remus’s eyes are worry and fear and the guilty sense of betrayal that comes from losing all his friends in the world.  The touches they exchange are fleeting and light, and they evaporate from his skin like so many lost yesterdays and tomorrows.  They will not both live to see Harry reach adulthood, Sirius knows.  Their shared spaces in this tiny cottage are sterile and the spaces between them stretch into achingly empty infinity.  He looks away from Remus.  He swallows down the whole tumbler of firewhiskey and it burns away the bitter taste in his mouth, leaves his throat raw.

            (Remus cannot bring himself to imagine his own twin of this never-was universe, because the Sirius Black that wasn’t hurts more than all the injuries from werewolf claws and teeth have in the years since he lost the Animagi who protected him from himself.  The Sirius Black that wasn’t wears all thirty-seven of his years like a man who has _lived_ all thirty-seven of those years.  When that Sirius smiles, there is still a hint of Padfoot in the curve of his lips, arrogance tempered by age, not burned away by pain or sacrificed so he could cling onto the rough edges of his sanity with bloody fingers.  That Sirius Black traces the lines by his eyes with soft fingertips that have never had to cast desperate spells to save his own life.  Remus cannot imagine that kind of gentleness in his Sirius; the very act of imagining shatters like broken glass fragments into his mind and the illusion is ruined by the grotesque pain that seeps out like blood and stains all those thoughts.  He sits alone and stares blankly out the cottage window at a starless sky.)

**Author's Note:**

> [Cross-posted to my tumblr](azurish.tumblr.com/post/68528080089/hiraeth-wolfstar-fic), as well.


End file.
